THE new Beatles documentary, Eight Days A Week: The Touring Years, is an exhilarating experience but tells us nothing new.

The new Beatles documentary, Eight Days A Week: The Touring Years, tells us nothing new

Director Ron Howard's new Beatles documentary - the first to be officially sanctioned by the band since their 1970 split - concentrates on the touring years of 1963 to 1966, splices in a good deal of previously unseen concert footage and unheard studio recording and reminds us, in one hundred and five glorious celluloid minutes, of what happens when something genuinely new crashes into a society that is completely unprepared.

However Eight Days A Week doesn't go near any of that, or indeed anything too sensitive.

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The new Beatles documentary, Eight Days A Week: The Touring Years, is an exhilarating experience but tells us nothing new

The film also does nothing to meddle with the relatively wholesome image The Beatles have maintained for nigh on 55 years.

Authorised writers close to the group have told very different stories of course, the upshot being that a young man on a stage with 20,000 girls screaming at him is unlikely to simply return to the hotel for an early night.

Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr instead talk of the impact that The Beatles' unprecedented effect had on their young selves - the archive footage of John Lennon and George Harrison follows suit - and it's a story that really takes off when I Want To Hold Your Hand tops the US charts in early 1964, "our ticket there" says McCartney.

And judging by audience reactions in the UK, especially those from teenage girls, the group knew what they were in for.

The shows at Manchester's ABC cinema in late 1963, for example, are scream and faint-fest, and the ageing colours of the film make for slightly creepy viewing.

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The band members, including John Lennon, talk about the effect The Beatles had on their young selves

But the real madness begins across the pond. In Vancouver in 1964 7,000 fans rushed the stage and 240 were hospitalised, and in Jacksonville, Florida, that same year and the moment of the Civil Rights Act, violence is in the air after the band insist that they will not play to segregated audiences.

In Vancouver in 1964, 7,000 fans rushed the stage and 240 were hospitalised

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In Vancouver in 1964, 7,000 fans rushed the stage and 240 were hospitalised

Whoopi Goldberg says that hearing The Beatles made her forget her skin colour, and feel like an individual.

American journalist Larry Kane soon joined the touring entourage and tells the story superbly, even praising the boys for their gentleness when he speaks of his mother's recent passing.

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But the ever-growing audiences and technical limitations of playing live in the Sixties soon took their toll.

A terrifying helicopter view of 1965's Shea Stadium concert in New York shows a vast structure that will fill to its 55,000 capacity, while newly available audio recordings of the gig from an audience stand-point sound, as Lennon later reflected, like "twenty thousand transistor radios".

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Elvis Costello remarked: 'It's amazing how in tune they were!'- but a new chapter then followed

The band had no onstage monitors and the crowd heard the music through the stadium's Tannoy system; a tinny din against deafening shrieking, although, as Elvis Costello remarks: "It's amazing how in tune they were!" The following year, live performance stopped altogether, and a whole new Beatles chapter began.

Howard's coup here is the unearthed archive material, which even extends to the band's final public performance on the rooftop of the Apple offices at 3 Savile Row in 1970.

Such moments are a delight to behold but only serve to enhance received narratives about The Beatles, and with no questions asked. Officially sanctioned, yes - but rigidly controlled.